Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard

One of the great things about being a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) is that you get a bit of money to spend at the Microsoft company store each year. This means that I can keep my keyboard up to date. I really like using the bendy ergonomic ones. They help with my wrists and I think they are the main reason I’ve never had any problems even though I type quite a lot. The other nice thing about them is that it is quite fun watching someone who has not seen one before trying to type using it…

Anyhoo, each year that goes by I worry that Microsoft might stop making bendy keyboards and so I buy another one for stock with my MVP award. Fortunately they seem to be alive and kicking, and the new keyboard I’ve just got is about the nicest I’ve seen. It has a very quiet key action and a few extra buttons and neat features including a zoom lever in the middle which you can use to change the magnification in apps like Word and PowerPoint.

If you have ever had any kind of RSI problems, or you are concerned about this aspect of computer use I’d strongly advise taking a look at such a keyboard. Once you get use to it I think you will find it very helpful.

Pain

Went up town today. Bought a copy of a game called Pain for the PS3. It is not what you would consider intellectually demanding (but then again I don’t want any demands made of my intellect just at the moment).

Anyhoo, Pain just gives you a destructible environment, a very large catapult. And a victim. You just fire the victim out of the catapult and watch as they bounce off the scenery suffering all manner of impact damage.

There are quite a few different scenes, a number of different people to fire (including David Hasselhoff if you pay an extra pound – not worth it though) and some themed games where you have to hit targets and stuff.

I think long term appeal is somewhat restricted, but as a quick blast it is quite fun.

Bed Dismantling

Today was a bit of a break, which was nice. I’d bought a bed on ebay (as you do) and so we had to get the old bed to pieces and round to next door.

Then we had to make space in the bedroom, put the new bed in, find it fits exactly (wahay!) and then I went off and picked up my new car. Turns out that buying new cars is another good displacement activity. And no, I didn’t get it on ebay.

True Story

I’ve not been writing all the time I suppose. Last week I had to take my computer in to the mender to have a working cpu board replaced with another working one.

Some time back, just hours before my trip to Cairo, my lovely MacBook became a lot less lovely by dropping dead on me. Fortunately I had a tiny spare machine in the form of my Advent notebook which did a sterling job of standing in for my shiny paperweight.

When I got back I took the laptop to the menders and they put a new cpu board in which worked fine. Unfortunately the board they fitted was the wrong one, and so last week I had to take two hour break from the courseware while my machine was back in the workshop having the board replaced with one that was 0.2 GHz faster. I’d like to be able to say that I can tell the difference, but I really can’t.

Windows 7 But Not Yet

I’ve had the brand new, Release to Manufacture version of Windows 7 for a while now, but I can’t install it because I daren’t change my machine in case something stops working.

Oh well. Although it must be said that operating system upgrades are one of the more drastic forms of displacement activity.